Blackphone: ‘Our smartphone won’t make you NSA-proof, but it’s a good start’

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“We have a bit of a problem with the press saying that the Blackphone will make you NSA-proof,” Phil Zimmerman, one of the Blackphone’s creators, tells me at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “If someone [at the Blackphone booth] tells you that it’ll protect you from the NSA, I’ll fire them.”

As we covered earlier on ExtremeTech, the Blackphone is essentially a mid-to-high-end Android smartphone (a customized build called PrivatOS) that comes with a bunch of privacy- and security-oriented apps. As far as cryptography goes, the Blackphone’s implementation of Silent Circle’s secure communication apps is pretty darn good. The Blackphone also offers an encrypted filesystem. The per-app granular permissions system is neat (but buggy in its current implementation, as many apps revolt when they find out that they’ve had their permissions revoked without being informed of the fact). There’s no Google Play store pre-installed, but a guy at the booth told me you could install it (though I don’t know how Google would feel about that). Priced at $630, it’s a pretty good deal, if you want a readymade device that is more secure out of the box than the latest iPhone or Galaxy S5.

What the Blackphone isn’t, however, is a completely secure communications device. Phil Zimmerman, creator of PGP, co-founder of Silent Circle, and one of the Blackphone’s creators, knows this. The guys at Geeksphone (the hardware makers of the Blackphone) know this. I know this. You know this. Most of the press and the majority of the general public, however, appear to think otherwise. Now, to be fair, Blackphone’s creepy, scare-mongering website was partially to blame for this (the site has now been significantly updated) — but it’s also down to the fact that most people just don’t understand how cryptography and mobile telephony works. We have been conditioned to think that good cryptography is some kind of universal security panacea — but the complete story is much more complex than that.

Basically, the Blackphone provides a good level of encryption between you and the target of your communication (VoIP). It does not provide any protection over the standard GSM/WCDMA radio. It also doesn’t provide any hardware-level security, except for the encrypted filesystem. Assuming the encryption doesn’t have some kind of backdoor, and that Zimmerman’s clever crypto scheme isn’t flawed, the Blackphone probably stops the NSA (and other intelligence agencies) from scanning the contents of your data packets. If you really believe that the NSA is interested in the minutiae of your everyday life, then by all means use the Blackphone.

The problem is, the Blackphone only protects your communications at the highest level — in software, running at a very high level on your Android-based smartphone. The Blackphone does not protect you against vulnerabilities in the Android subsystem, in the application processor (SoC), or in the baseband itself. As we’ve covered before, your phone’s baseband — the device that handles negotiation with cell towers and other messy stuff — is essentially a black box, with its own CPU and operating system. The baseband has complete, low-level access to your microphone — access that the Blackphone cannot mitigate against. If the NSA really wants to tap your phone, that is probably the attack vector that it would use.

“If Barack Obama decides that” — Zimmerman reaches out for my press pass and takes a long look at it — “Sebastian Anthony is a threat, the Blackphone won’t help you.” I stop for a moment and seriously consider whether that unpaid North Carolina parking ticket constitutes an act of terrorism. Probably not. “If the NSA wants to hack you, they’ll use a zero-day vulnerability,” which, as he points out, by definition, is basically impossible for the Blackphone (or indeed any device) to protect you from. Zimmerman says that the first question he asked, during the development process, was whether the baseband could be secured. The answer is not yet — but if the Blackphone is a commercial success, it gets us one step closer. “The Blackphone is just the beginning of the conversation.”

To make a truly secure phone, we’d need to build a device that is completely open from the ground up. There are some ongoing efforts in open-source basebands, and the emergence of software defined networking could help as well. This ignores the question of whether carriers would even let such a device onto their networks, though. The concept of a truly secure mobile communications device is certainly something we should continue to discuss, but we should be under no illusions that such a device will ever come to market.

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Scott

Question: How do you stop the NSA from reading your mail? Answer: You dont. Ive been wracking my brain about that since the Post started breaking the Ed Snowden story. Technology products have too many potential points of failure, with regard to espionage. Take Apple’s current security flaw- I am to believe that code that checks the SSL certificate validity compiled when it was missing a bracket? A compiler is expressly designed to catch such errors, and errors of syntax like that are not missed. Much more likely is that error got ‘inserted’ at some point after RTM, but prior to the OS load at foxconn. It’s remarkable to me that Im not hearing that view expressed in the press, it seems a bit obvious.

Singh1699

Author should point out that baseband means sim card.

Also of course in person, pigeon, runner, or short wave radio.

Go to YouTube type in real kharku singhs. See the true warriors of the nation, using the radios.

Michael Scoffield

You’re embarrassing yourself !

Singh1699

Was wrong about one thing, you’re embarrassing your mother..

Michael Scoffield

Bahahhahah, you can find my cumback on your mom’s teeth !

Michael Scoffield

Bahahhahah, you can find my cumback on your mom’s teeth !

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Nah, the baseband is different from the SIM (but the SIM has its own OS and processor as well, yes).

Jonathan Mager

So basically, this phone doesn’t do shit.

Scott

This phone does some things, it just cant stop the most sophisticated attacks.

Scott

This phone does some things, it just cant stop the most sophisticated attacks.

Alex

Sorry but those are the only attacks worth defending against, otherwise you don’t need a completely new “Blackphone” or “PrivatOS”, just install CyanogenMod, enable WhisperPush, install TextSecure, and encrypt your filesystem. Blackphone doesn’t offer anything more. Or did I miss something?

powerwiz

Who is anyone joking here. Lets see prior to Snowdens release which was in 2012 everyone here there anywhere was touting how secure there systems were. Billions have been spent on security infrastructure. Then in 2012 a person no one had heard of releases a boat load of documents. We find out that everything and anything is bypassed with ease. Then as each week passes we learn there is literally nothing that outside there grasp.

One release he made I found interesting was the one where apparently the NSA intercepts electronics coming from the factory in the mail. They modify them and repack them and off they go.

So go ahead buy this thing its no more secure then anything else. You want privacy? People can start by not prostituting there information on Facebook…honestly no one cares anyhow. You can stop using GMail and others to send person information since there ToS explicitly says they collect, read blah blah. You can stop using Geo Location services to tell the world your at Five Guys…no one cared to begin with.

Its ironic we all want privacy but yet it seems what … a couple billion people share there lives online on a intimate level that never has been seen. Then we have a problem with it?

You know how the Russian Government is dealing with classified issues now? Putin said they bought typewriters.

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